not one living thing

by Maureen Sullivan Originally published in sneaker wave magazine on September 22, 2024

THE DAY BEFORE SHE DIED, I called my mother a cockroach. Not to her face. I shouted this across the Gardner School parking lot at pickup time, across the jubilant sounds of the last day of school, across the ignored history I thought I could pretend wasn’t mine.

Mom’s health was failing—again. “She’ll be fine. She’s a cockroach,” I yelled to the man who had just wished me, and my mother, well. “Nothing can kill her!”

I may have even laughed.

The man, an ophthalmologist, looked at me as though I was out of focus. A bit of his disgust hung in the air, air that I breathed easily while my mother’s lungs three thousand miles away started their final collapse. I should have known he wouldn’t appreciate the strain of humor grown in the peculiar Petri dish of my life. Not many “nice” people did.

For my daughter’s sake, I wanted to be nice. I wanted to celebrate her second grade year the way a good mother should, but I was tired of myself, of always feeling the need to hide and pacify and gloss over the shitty truths of my mother’s life so that no human within a hundred yards of me, friend or foe, would have to feel any discomfort. I worried what others thought about my mother and, by default, about me. I thought life would get better and less complicated the moment she left earth for good. Then she left me standing in a body that looked and moved like her body, a body now with the similar motions of a vessel adrift at sea, straining to circumnavigate her grief, my grief, our grief.

My mother had many names. Her family called her Maynan. The lawyers settled on Mary Ann Strippy Sullivan Moore. There were two marriages; neither of them stuck. Who could blame her for marrying at nineteen with a maiden name of Strippy?

Her three children were all from the first marriage to my rock-solid dad, Tom Sullivan, also known by her kin as The Damn Yankee and, after a few drinks, The Goddamned Yankee, a verified S.O.B for moving Maynan all the way from Savannah, Georgia, to Pennsylvania: the god-forsaken place (her words, not mine) where she endured thirty-six winters.

The second marriage was to a die-hard believer in the Confederacy, her high school sweetheart, Charlie. The marriage proposal happened after he read in the Savannah Morning News that my grandmother had died and assumed correctly that Mom was back in Savannah and had inherited some money. Charlie had been sober for twenty years, but after a few months with Mom, he was drunk and flat broke. I suspect he was almost broke when they got hitched. A few years after their union, his name was added to her checking account (Mom’s signature looked forged), and she got the “flu.” I can’t prove he was trying to kill her but he sure as hell wasn’t trying to keep her breathing when she would forget to turn on her oxygen and then forget to eat or drink water. She ended up in the hospital, severely dehydrated and weighing eighty-seven pounds.

My daughter was three at the time, and Mom’s living situation had cast a long, worrisome shadow over our family Christmas. Two weeks later, on my birthday, my sister and I managed to move her back to Pennsylvania on a winter day when the temperature was sixteen below–which meant her prediction of when she’d ever move north again came true. Hell had frozen over. Her northern inferno welcomed her with ice. I guess she forgot Pennsylvania was her children’s native soil when she got to trash talking the state and its people.

My mother’s charm and wit could mask her ugly moments…or years. Her southern friends took special care at the cemetery letting me know that she could never conform, in spite of how beautiful and smart she was. Northern acquaintances called her spunky. (I had many other descriptive words for her and spunky was not among them). She kicked her final bucket on June 12th, 2008.

Oddly enough, Mom and I had decided sometime in my my thirties that we would unofficially switch my birthday to June 12th if friends and family kept dying or getting injured on or around my actual birthday of January 12th.

My birthday weeks were mayhem for my family: my brother totaled his first car, my step-grandfather went into the hospital and never made it back home, my brother totaled his sixth car, Mom was involuntarily committed to York Hospital Psych ward, I came down with walking pneumonia and an inner and outer ear infection, our favorite cat walked into the woods and never returned…I could go on. The birthday curse is what we called it, but just like with everything else in her life, Mom broke it.

Quite often in my youth, after the strain of Christmas and while heading into the deepest part of a Pennsylvania winter, my mother would crack. She would go south in every way a person can go south. Sometimes it only involved geography when she would leave for Georgia on or very close to my birthday, but we didn’t talk about that when we collaborated on moving the date.

We also never talked about my twenty-sixth birthday. I’d started a new job in Rochester, New York, and she sat in her La-Z-Boy and dialed my new phone number just after midnight while a nor’easter raged along most of the east coast. My father was sound asleep upstairs in their home in Harrisburg.

My mother was pie-eyed drunk most nights by then, but that night she was suicidal and called me even though my sister Peggy lived only twenty minutes away. After an hour of my pleading, she hung up. I didn’t know what to do, so I called Peggy, and she drove through the ice storm to our parent’s house to find our mother vomiting blood. She also found all our framed high school and college portraits in the kitchen garbage can.

From my perspective, Mom set her dull world on fire so she could enjoy the flames. Flare-ups inevitably led to flare-downs, and a Pennsylvania January was a hard, dark month to be a southern girl living north of the Mason Dixon line.

A few birthdays later, I began calling my mother early in the morning. I would thank her for giving birth to me and tell her how much I loved her. I used to think this was so I wouldn’t have to feel the disappointment when she neglected to call me for so many years to simply wish me a happy birthday on my birthday. Sort of a weird twist on a You can’t fire me, I quit phone call. I’m not sure now why I called. I’m not sure now why she chose June 12th as her day to die.

The hospice nurse said the dying wait for a loved one either to show up or to leave, and in all their years of experience the nurses and caregivers had never seen anyone go through the task of dying as fast as my mother. Closed her eyes on a Tuesday afternoon and was gone by Thursday morning.

It was Peggy who later came up with the plausible theory that our mother “offed herself.”

Mom was frail in body only; her mind remained sharp until the end and she knew she was running out of money. On her final birthday, she told Dad’s sister that she didn’t want to be here anymore, and when the physical therapists tried to get her to come to the weekly appointment available to all the residents at the assisted living center, her response was always the same: “Pshaw, just spitting in the wind.”

Peggy could remember many visits to The Woods Assisted Living facility when Mom would tell the aides to leave her twice-daily dose of ten pills on the nightstand and that she would take them when her daughter left. Mom, like me, couldn’t swallow pills unless she placed them at the far back of her throat one at a time, then washed them down with a large, loud gulp of water.

Peggy has told me about her last two visits with Mom many times: both on the same day, before Peggy was scheduled to fly to Paris for a long-awaited European vacation with her family. In the morning Mom told her, “Go enjoy your family. I’ll be okay, and if I die while you are gone, I’ll try to get a message to you that I’m fine and have moved to the great beyond.”

Peggy’s flight wasn’t until evening, so she went back in to see Mom after lunch. Mom’s eyes were closed. Peggy started talking to the aide who had come to get the untouched lunch tray, and the second Mom heard Peggy’s voice her eyes popped open, and she said, “What are you doing here?” At this point in her story, Peggy slips into her Daffy Duck voice: “Curses! Foiled again.” We laugh until we cry and then we laugh again.

Peggy left for her European vacation two days before I boarded a plane in Portland, Oregon, and I was thinking, I’m on my way to be with my mom to appease my sister. I was resentful about being worried–again. I was resentful, too, because I had something good going on in my life, and Mom’s dramas, health or otherwise, habitually coincided with when my days began to feel settled, manageable…normal. I had just returned home from my first-ever writer’s workshop in Vermont—The Orion Writing Workshop—and I was excited to tell Mom all about it, which is silly now that I think about it. In so many of my “adult” conversations with my mother, even after I became a mother, no matter what words I spoke about myself they sounded the same: Mom, watch me. Are you watching? Did you see me? 

The workshop wasn’t the first time I admitted to myself I wanted to be a writer, but it was the first time I did something about the wanting. Writing was Mom’s turf, and I didn’t want to be anything like her by the time I started college, which led to my B. S. in Biology.

Mom had gone back to school when I started first grade. She got a degree in English and then her teaching credentials, and at our house on Walnut Street, there were many evenings when Mom and her three children’s heads bent down at the same angle while we did our homework together at the maple kitchen table. In my elementary school days, it was rare not to see Mom at night with her head bent at the same angle engrossed in a book while the rest of us watched TV. But by the time I started middle school, her head would often bend at a more severe angle after too much Cutty Sark, and there was no book in her lap.

Maybe that explains why through so much of my daughter’s youth I uprooted our plans and routines to visit Mom in Pennsylvania. Olivia was four when we started the frequent flights from Portland to see her ailing grandmother. In between visits, I would fret and feel responsible for my mother’s happiness or lack thereof. 

One flight, when Olivia was four and a half, the plane descended, and I leaned over to see what view she was taking in. We looked out to the quilt of a Pennsylvania spring–orderly fields, some planted, some freshly plowed. I was grateful for the gentle landscape of my home, the rolling hills, and quiet valleys, and slow, wide rivers. Then we flew low and close over the cooling towers of Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant. Unearthly white clouds of steam rose high and rolled like small thunderheads.

“Mama, what is that?” Olivia’s body leaned into mine. Her gaze out the window remained fixed on the towers.

“Oh, that’s Three Mile Island. It’s a nuclear power plant.”

With dish-plate eyes and more than a hint of fear and confusion in her voice she turned her face toward me and said, “That’s a PLANT?”    

In my mind I heard her thoughts. Where is Mom taking me? What are they growing in Pennsylvania? Do not land this plane. Abort, abort!

I tried hard not to laugh—or cry. I despised being the adult in her life who had to relay the tragic aspects of the world, and I had to explain this in a way that wouldn’t terrify her. “Oh no, honey. Not that kind of plant. A plant can also be where something is made, like a car plant makes cars, a toy plant makes toys, a nuclear power plant makes nuclear power.”

“What’s nuclear power?”

“Well, peanut, I’m not sure how nuclear power works, but I know it gets made into electricity so we can turn lights on and have heat.”

Truth was, it still terrified me to think about how cooling tower number two had almost rendered her mother’s young healthy body into a radiated cancer-filled void, where no babies should ever grow. When the near meltdown of Three Mile Island occurred, I was in my 11^th grade English Class. We lived close, twenty miles as the crow flies, downwind.

“Oh, I bet Aunt Peggy has lots of goodies for you!” I said.

Of course I chose the easy out, and of course I felt guilty for not telling her a child’s version of the truth, and of course I eventually decided to write about it.

When Olivia was in 2nd grade, we flew on Valentine’s Day to see Mom because Peggy was sure Mom was on her way out since her decline was sudden, and she was so out of it, but a few hours after we landed, one of the staff at The Woods Assisted Living Facility noticed that a wheel of Mom’s hospital bed had rolled onto the tubing to her oxygen. Mom was out of the woods, yet still in The Woods—not dying, only in need of fresh air.

During one of our visits to her small room, I asked Mom why we didn’t leave like so many had after the news of the accident at Three Mile Island. Why hadn’t we gone to Georgia until it was safe? She said our neighbor was an engineer at Peach Bottom, another nuclear power plant in the area, and he said everything was fine, that they had it under control.

Mom wanted to know why I was asking after so many years. I told her that I had gotten into a writing workshop and wanted to get the Three Mile Island essay reviewed. She said I always had a way with words. And then she told me whenever she tried to write she could never get past the editor in her head.

I didn’t know how to respond so I shrugged. I didn’t know that it would be my last visit with Mom. Olivia was getting antsy and truth be told, I was too. I held Olivia’s young hand while I gave my Mom’s hand a gentle squeeze, and then we left. I wish now I had thought of something kind to say, that at the very least I had acknowledged how hard that feeling is when the critic is louder than the creator. Talked to her like another writer and not my mom, who was dying.

The next morning, I went alone to see her before our plane left. She turned on The Price is Right, couldn’t miss that showcase showdown. I got up to leave, gave her a quick peck on the cheek, and was more than slightly pissed but tried to pretend all was fine.

My final image of Mom: she is smiling, waving goodbye from her bed with boney hands and sad eyes as I waited for the elevator. Maybe she was tired and just wanted me to sit with her, maybe I asked too many questions, maybe she was a little loopy from the days before when she wasn’t getting enough oxygen.

Two days after we got back Olivia’s teacher called me and asked if something had happened in Pennsylvania. Olivia, who loved school and was an easy kid, was acting out. When she got home, I asked if something had made her sad on our last trip. She was very clear, and said, “I don’t like where grandma lives. Those people – they’re like ghosts.”

Olivia and I had taken many flights to Pennsylvania from Portland, many of them last minute and none of them cheap. I probably shouldn’t have counted but in the two and half years before Mom died, Peggy had summoned me for six other “it” times. Seven, if the flight to Georgia to move Mom back to Pennsylvania counted. Olivia’s dad was a cardiologist and his schedule was almost impossible to shift, so Olivia was on all those flights but two. It hadn’t yet dawned on me that maybe my sister wanted to see Olivia without having to fly to Oregon. It also hadn’t occurred to me that I could say no to my sister. My brother, who only lived a half-hour drive away, deferred the tending of our mother to Peggy, but he was with her as was my dad most of the day before she passed, even though she was already in a coma. Not one of her children was with her when she died.

Olivia was not with me on my final 11^th hour flight to Pennsylvania. I kept my promise to her that she wouldn’t have to ever go back into The Woods again. Mom had died the morning before my last flight to see her. Part of me felt guilty and the other part felt empty. At 30,000 feet, I had plenty of time to replay my last phone call with Mom four days before her death. Our dialogue was not Hollywood material.

“Hey, Mom, how are you?”

Her gravelly voice created by her love affair with cigarettes came through the phone line with a pissed off tone. “Well, I’m still here, rah, rah, rah.”

“Is there anything I can do? Should I send chocolate?”

“No.” Her voice wavered but her mind was steady. “I’m not very hungry these days.”

“Should I come see you?”

“That’d be nice.”

“I won’t be able to get there right away. I just got back yesterday from that Vermont writer’s workshop for a week, and Olivia’s last day of school is Wednesday.”

“It would be good to see you,” Mom said.

Participants at the workshop were allowed to bring one essay for the editor of Orion Magazine for a one-on-one review. As the week progressed, I saw many of the other writers return from their reviews dejected and feeling that their work had been harshly judged. I thought about canceling my review to save my new and tender writing ego.

“Mom, I got a great review of my Three Mile Island essay. The editor thought if I cleaned it up a little it would be worthy to submit to the Op-ed departments of The New York or LA Times!”

“Well, of course she has to say something nice. That’s her job, honey.”

The words left a taste of something that I could not discern but had tasted before. Sometimes the flavor seemed so trivial that I didn’t notice I had been insulted until after she left the room or hung up the phone–or died. What was it that she had fed to me, what had I swallowed? I didn’t write for three years after that. 

“Okay, well,” I said, “I better get busy with the laundry, hope you feel better soon. I love you, Mom.” At least I said that.

“I love you too, Reeni bean.”

I hung up and immediately called Peggy and stated my theory that Mom was way too ornery to be on death’s door. Peggy couldn’t explain, but she felt that Mom was close to leaving for good and it was impossible to know how long it was going to take. Mom had been on hospice. For. A. Year.

My mother had an extraordinary ability to live through health episodes that would kill average humans. A lifetime of hard living, of entering and exiting psych wards committed and undone in a day or a month, did not weaken her vital organs–it gave them stamina. Five years before her final exit, she dropped to eighty-seven pounds, got pneumonia, and refused oxygen and a hospital stay because she wasn’t allowed to smoke. She left the hospital against medical advice with a handful of antibiotics and lived. My mother didn’t want to survive. She just wanted to know that we would be concerned about her survival. Make a fuss. She needed us to offer her our help so she could refuse it. I believe it was about this time when the cockroach humor began. I may have joked with Peggy, or her with me, that it might be possible to cut off our mother’s head and have her live for a few more months.

The thing about Mom is, if she had known why we called her a cockroach and had she been sane when she overheard us say it, she would have belly-laughed, loud and large. Larger than what made sense for her bird-boned body. Her blue eyes, magnified by her thick glasses, would have widened and her eyebrows would have arched toward her always frosted up-do. Her head would have tilted back, and every bit of dental work in her mouth would have been exposed, her beautiful smile so wide, her laugh so true.

Yet the fact remains that I called my dying mother a cockroach. Worse yet, I had said it to someone who didn’t laugh, would never get it—an outsider. In hindsight, it might have been more respectful to nickname her after the flashier, giant, tropical roach with wings that every southerner swears is not a roach: the Palmetto Bug, which is a pretty name for a roach in the south. The bugs are roaches. They die hard and crunch underfoot. My mother was not a roach, but she was by all accounts, southern. And when she died, in my mind, being southern was one small notch above being a roach. I did not yet comprehend how being raised by a southern mother classified me by my own definition, also, as one small notch above a roach.

On the plane during a short, fitful dream, the bluest, most beautiful eyes in my life surfaced. Olivia’s innocent face looked up at me, and in her gaze of adoration and need they asked me to see her. The pilot’s announcement about turbulence woke me, and I doubted if I had ever truly seen my daughter. What would my seven-year-old’s nickname be for me when she was my age, and I was old? I buckled up, raised the shade and looked out the window to billowing clouds and a blue-black sky.

About the author:

Maureen Sullivan teaches English at Clark Community College. She received an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in 2015 and is working on a memoir about the reverberations of childhood in Pennsylvania with a bipolar, southern mother. Coming to terms with her southern bloodline has been more difficult than accepting her mother’s mental illness. Maureen lives on a remote San Juan Island, with her husband and her ridiculously large Great Pyrenees and, in the good years, a few hundred thousand honeybees.